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A radical way to perceive who we are in the universe by Michael Talbot.
A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get...

Daniel Dennett
This chapter is remarkable for Dennett’s style. There can be little doubt that Dennett’s dominance over much of modern consciousness studies is due in part to the beguiling quality of his style of writing. However, his approach in this chapter is markedly different from his seminal...

Benjamin Libet
The article concentrates on Libet’s own experiments showing that unconscious electrical activity in the brain preceded voluntary actions by up to 400ms. This discovery has been widely seized on, although not be Libet himself, as a proof that freewill does not exist and thus as...

Sam Harris
Libet’s famous experiment is introduced at an early stage in this book, and along with similar experiments, it is essentially the whole basis of the author’s argument. In Libet’s studies, activity in the motor cortex was apparent about 300 milliseconds before subjects were conscious of...

Daniel Wegner
The author’s purpose is to demonstrate that conscious will is not efficacious. The Libet experiments suggested that unconscious processing drives trivial actions such as moving a finger. Wegner argues that it is the same for more important activities. To do this, he must separate...

Benjamin Libet
In his introductory chapter, Libet admits that his views on subjective phenomena have altered somewhat since he was a young scientist. He says that he started with a full belief in determinsitic materialism, but has come round to the view that the subjective cannot be derived...

John Searle
Searle views consciousness as a real biological phenomenon. He notes that it is qualitative, subjective and unified. Every conscious state is qualitative, in that there is something that it is like, or feels like to be in that state. This applies both to sensations and to thoughts....

Henry Stapp
Stapp starts by taking the view that the mind/matter problem represents a conflict between classical physics and our own intuitions. In classical physics we have to be automatons, while our intuition tells us that we are in charge of our actions. The dominant paradigm in neuroscience...

Consciousness is defined here as our subjective experience of the external world, our physical bodies, our thinking and our emotions. Consciousness is also defined in terms of ‘being like something’ to have experiences. It is like something to be alive, like something to have a body and like...

The features of quantum theory that make it special and also possibly relevant to consciousness can be summarised as follows:
1.) Quantum theory describes the fundamental level of energy and matter. In contrast to higher levels, the quantum level has aspects, such as mass, charge and spin that are...